How to Love People Who Suck
Because it's tiring, Aquinas, ok?
When you’ve been in some kind of Jesus Job for a while, you get a lot of the same questions asked over and over. Friends, family members, and strangers over Instagram want to pick your brain on various aspects of the Gospel that you may or may not be qualified to answer. But overwhelmingly, I can tell you the number one question I get.
“My (friend, cousin, college roommate) is living in sin (contraception, sexual immorality, just generally being a jackass). I want to keep them in my life. I don’t want to judge them, but I want them to go to Heaven. How can I love them? What do I DO?”
It’s a perfectly understandable question. Our modern culture has opened the door to interactions with people we’d never have been surrounded by in centuries past. We’re exposed to opinions of every spectrum and color and weight; if I write something on the internet someone hates they can fire off a pissy tweet and get it in front of my eyeballs in three minutes. My friends are a diverse group of thought and belief instead of my fellow farmers or Catholics or family members. And my life has moved much farther up the Maslow pyramid from need for survival than ever before. I have the time to care, in a way the people of 1675 just…didn’t.
And when you know something, like that loving God is the path to eternal joy, you do want others to know it too. You’ve found a freedom in the yoke of Jesus and you want everyone to experience it. That’s good. In fact, I think that’s Truth. If your heart is truly seeking Jesus, you must want to evangelize. Loving Jesus does not mean keeping Jesus for yourself.
But we also are rightfully wary of being…you know. That Friend. The one who looks down on people who act differently from them and walks around with a hoity-toity biblical answer for all of life’s questions. We’re aware that Jesus isn’t a drug to be pushed but a relationship to be invited into, and that line can seem awfully tricky to dance on.
And when you aren’t comfortable sharing your faith, it begins to feel like you’re walking through life without anybody really knowing you. When a friend casually mentions things that go against your deeply held beliefs or even invites you to partake in them. The day the Dobbs decision was announced I had multiple friends flooding my texts, telling me about how odd it was to be at work. Coworkers were bemoaning that the death of innocents was no longer constitutionally protected, and what do you do, exactly? Do you say something? Do you smile and nod? You have a job, you have health insurance, you have children to provide for, and also, you don’t want to seem like a jerk. You don’t want to be a jerk.